“Pharaoh hurriedly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘I stand guilty before HASHEM your God and before you. Forgive my offense just this once, and plead [that your God] but remove this death from me.’… HASHEM caused a shift to a very strong west wind [so that] not a single locust remained in all the territory of Egypt. But HASHEM stiffened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go.”—Exodus 10:16-20
“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: They promised to take our land, and they took it.”—Red Cloud, Lakota leader
Certain aspects of the Exodus story are troubling, even disturbing. The suffering caused by the plagues is not pretty, and it’s all too easy to imagine the great wail that went up with the death of the firstborn in Egypt. Worse still, it seems that if God had not actively intervened to make Pharaoh more stubborn, the Israelites might have been free before this even had to happen!
Yes, I find Par’shat Bo disturbing. But it does not make me question God’s moral fiber or buy into Christian interpretations of a wrathful “Old Testament” deity. On the contrary, it fills me with admiration for the Torah’s keen insight into the pathology of power.
The thing is, I don’t think we are meant to read the Torah like a novel, with God as simply one character among many. In the Exodus story, God is a historical force sweeping the Israelites to freedom, and events unfold as they are destined to. Since I view this story as a blueprint for revolution, I see the disturbing aspects as serving an important didactic function.
The Torah admits as much in this week’s opening verse: “Then HASHEM said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart… in order that I may display these My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your sons and of your sons’ sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians.”
The Torah narrator is breaking the fourth wall, saying, “Pay attention! This part is important!” God does not really usurp Pharaoh’s free will; the Torah is merely adding literary embellishments to make sure we don’t gloss over the significant parts.
Because Pharaoh’s stubbornness is very important. It represents the characteristic of the powerful that most decent people, to their eternal grief, find hardest to understand: Some people are so wedded to their power, so invested in the oppressive systems that they head, that nothing short of death will ever make them change.
Four times, Pharaoh promises to free the Israelites, only to go back on his word the moment the pressure is removed. Even after he frees them, as we will read next week, he goes back on his word again. Only twice does he give up his power over the Israelites, and both times only after human beings have been killed. The second time, he is one of them.
If you have ever been involved in radical political struggle, you probably recognize this pattern. It can be summed up by one of the most important rules of the game: “Cops lie.” It’s not just cops, of course—the fact that politicians lie is more widely accepted than the theory of evolution. And don’t even get me started on the corporations (tobacco companies, anyone?).
On the small scale, this means that the cops will often arrest you after striking a bargain to the contrary. On a larger scale, it means that the US has violated every treaty it has ever signed with an indigenous nation. It means that First World countries talk about democracy, but send in the CIA or Marines if an election doesn’t go their way (Arbenz and Allende, anyone?).
I’ll tell you why the cowboys always seem to win and the Indians always seem to lose: it’s because we keep believing that our opponents are people like us. And most of us are simply not the kind of people who torture prisoners, deliberately terrorize civilian populations or make deals with someone just so we can kill them easier.
But the powerful are not like us, we who value life so highly. The powerful are worshippers of death, and like Pharaoh, they will do anything to hold onto their power. We could make a case for this psychologically, but I think that the American continent’s 500-year history of terror and genocide is a far more compelling proof. To take just one example, it is well documented that the FBI orchestrated the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton in 1969.
I truly believe that every human being is capable of profound change. But there is a great difference between being able to change and being willing to. And I see no evidence, in history or the present day, that the powerful have any intention of giving up the privileges that they reap from their ongoing oppression of the poor, the brown and the nonhuman.
As disturbed as I am by the wailing of the Egyptian mothers, I am far more disturbed by 400 years of wailing Israelite mothers, by 500 years of wailing indigenous American mothers and by the blood that cries out to us at this very moment, as it is spilled. And I will not weep, nor take wine from my cup, for anything suffered by the slavemasters, until all the slaves are free.